History
Occidental bought Anadarko in 2019 with Berkshire Hathaway's backing and heavy debt, weathered the 2020 oil crash, bought CrownRock in 2024, then sold OxyChem to cut debt.
2019: The Anadarko takeover
The major story beats begin in 2019, though Occidental is a much older company. On April 30, 2019 it agreed to sell Berkshire Hathaway $10 billion of new Series A preferred stock, paying 8%, plus a warrant for 80,000,000 common shares at $62.50. The deal was conditional on Occidental completing its acquisition of Anadarko Petroleum.
On May 9 Occidental agreed to buy Anadarko for roughly $57 billion including debt, after outbidding Chevron. Anadarko owed Chevron a $1 billion breakup fee. The cash portion was to come from the Berkshire money and a bridge loan of up to $21.8 billion. In June Occidental registered the share leg: $59.00 in cash plus 0.2934 of an Occidental share for each Anadarko share. The ratio was fixed, so Anadarko holders carried the risk of Occidental's share price moving before closing. The filing also set out a planned sale of Anadarko's African assets to Total, a deal formally signed on August 5 as a definitive $8.8 billion agreement covering Algeria, Ghana, Mozambique and South Africa, to take effect once the merger closed.
The deal was not uncontested. In May, Carl Icahn's funds, who were Occidental stockholders, went to the Delaware Court of Chancery seeking inspection of Occidental's records. These were records requests rather than challenges to the merger itself.
On August 1, ahead of closing, Occidental offered to swap more than twenty series of inherited Anadarko and Kerr-McGee bonds for new Occidental notes. The acquisition closed on August 8, 2019, for about $36 billion in cash and stock plus assumed debt. That same day Occidental raised $13 billion in a ten-part bond offering, and the purchase was also funded partly by an $8.8 billion term loan. An amendment on August 13 restated the exchange offer terms: $1,000 of Occidental notes for early tenders and $970 for later ones. Shares on issue rose from about 895 million at the end of 2018 to about 1.04 billion by the end of 2019.
2020: Crash and unwinding
The heavy debt met the COVID-era oil crash. On April 15, 2020 Occidental paid the Berkshire preferred dividend in stock rather than cash, issuing 17,274,130 new common shares and diluting existing holders. The filing gave no reason.
On May 21 the Total plan partly unravelled. Occidental completed the Mozambique and South Africa sales, but after pushback from Algerian officials it decided to keep operating in Algeria, and Total then walked away from the Ghana purchase. Occidental said it would market Ghana separately. The cached filings do not confirm the outcome.
In July, with its stock hit hard, Occidental sold $2 billion of new notes at 8% to 8.875% to fund a tender offer buying back other bonds. Later that month it gave every common shareholder one warrant for each eight shares held, exercisable at $22. Shares on issue ended 2020 at about 1.08 billion.
2021-2023: A quiet stretch
The record is quiet for these years. The one major event was Hurricane Ida in September 2021, which forced Occidental to shut in several Gulf of Mexico platforms and move onshore support operations after shore-base damage. Three of ten platforms had restarted within days, but full recovery depended on third-party infrastructure outside Occidental's control. Share counts fell to about 879 million by the end of 2023, though the beats do not explain the decline.
2023-2026: CrownRock and OxyChem
On December 10, 2023 Occidental agreed to buy CrownRock, L.P., a private Permian Basin producer, for about $12.0 billion: $9.1 billion in cash, 29,560,619 new Occidental shares, and about $1.2 billion of assumed debt. A committed 364-day bridge loan of up to $10.0 billion from BofA backed the cash. Later in December Occidental lined up a $4.7 billion term loan to help fund the deal and refinance CrownRock's debt.
The purchase closed on August 1, 2024. CrownRock's former owners received registration rights to resell the Occidental shares they were given.
On October 3, 2025 Occidental agreed to sell its OxyChem chemicals business to Berkshire Hathaway for $9.7 billion in cash, a sale likely aimed at cutting the debt built up from CrownRock. It completed on January 2, 2026. As of that date, Occidental had sold OxyChem and owned CrownRock outright.
Written from the 22 story beats below (2019 to 2 Jan 2026), which come from the company's own announcements and filings.